Harvard Book Store is pleased to host book signings (open to all!) with this year’s featured authors at Harvard University’s Vericon XIV.

Vericon is an annual science fiction, fantasy, and speculative fiction convention, featuring awesome events like book signings, movie screenings, and author panels. Vericon XIV will run from Friday March 21st to Sunday March 23rd. Events usually go from 10 in the morning until 8 at night, though this varies throughout the weekend.

Most events take place at Sever Hall or Lowell Lecture hall, with book signings here at Harvard Book Store. Signings will take place on Saturday March 22nd afternoon.

B.J. Novak (The Office, Saving Mr. Banks) signs One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories at Harvard Book Store on Monday February 10th.

The signing is open to the public and will take place from 12:30 to 1:30pm on Monday, February 10. Arrive early to ensure your spot in line! The signing will end promptly at 1:30pm and is in addition to our sold out Brattle Theatre event that evening.

Can’t make it to the signing? Order a signed book for in-store pickup or shipment throughout the United States.

PLEASE NOTE: This is a book signing only. Customers who wish to join the signing line must have at least one copy of One More Thing with proof of purchase from Harvard Book Store. Mr. Novak will NOT be signing any materials other than the book. Stay tuned for more details on signing line rules.

Our 6pm Brattle Theatre event with B.J. Novak is SOLD OUT and there will be no standby line.

Harvard Book Store is pleased to welcome B.J. NOVAK, writer and actor best known for his work on NBC’s Emmy Award-winning series The Office, for a reading and discussion of his debut book, One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories.
B.J. Novak’s One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories is an endlessly entertaining, surprisingly sensitive, and startlingly original debut that signals the arrival of a brilliant new voice in American fiction.

A boy wins a $100,000 prize in a box of Frosted Flakes—only to discover that claiming the winnings might unravel his family. A woman sets out to seduce motivational speaker Tony Robbins—turning for help to the famed motivator himself. A new arrival in Heaven, overwhelmed with options, procrastinates over a long-ago promise to visit his grandmother. We also meet Sophia, the first artificially intelligent being capable of love, who falls for a man who might not be ready for it himself; a vengeance-minded hare, obsessed with scoring a rematch against the tortoise who ruined his life; and post-college friends who try to figure out how to host an intervention in the era of Facebook. Along the way, we learn why wearing a red T-shirt every day is the key to finding love, how February got its name, and why the stock market is sometimes just . . . down.

Finding inspiration in questions from the nature of perfection to the icing on carrot cake, One More Thing has at its heart the most human of phenomena: love, fear, hope, ambition, and the inner stirring for the one elusive element that just might make a person complete. Across a dazzling range of subjects, themes, tones, and narrative voices, the many pieces in this collection are like nothing else, but they have one thing in common: they share the playful humor, deep heart, sharp eye, inquisitive mind, and altogether electrifying spirit of a writer with a fierce devotion to the entertainment of the reader.

In two volumes, Boxers & Saints tells two parallel stories. The first is of Little Bao, a Chinese peasant boy whose village is abused and plundered by Westerners claiming the role of missionaries. Little Bao, inspired by visions of the Chinese gods, joins a violent uprising against the Western interlopers. Against all odds, their grass-roots rebellion is successful.

But in the second volume, Yang lays out the opposite side of the conflict. A girl whose village has no place for her is taken in by Christian missionaries and finds, for the first time, a home with them. As the Boxer Rebellion gains momentum, she must decide whether to abandon her Christian friends or to commit herself fully to Christianity.

Jonathan Lethem appears at the Brattle Theatre for a signing on Thursday October 10, 2013 at 6:00 PM.

Press Release:

Harvard Book Store is pleased to welcome National Book Critics Circle Award–winning author JONATHAN LETHEM for a reading of his novel, Dissident Gardens.

At the center of Jonathan Lethem’s novel stand two extraordinary women. Rose Zimmer, the aptly nicknamed Red Queen of Sunnyside, Queens, is an unreconstructed Communist and mercurial tyrant who terrorizes her neighborhood and her family with the ferocity of her personality and the absolutism of her beliefs. Her brilliant and willful daughter, Miriam, is equally passionate in her activism, but flees Rose’s suffocating influence and embraces the Age of Aquarius counterculture of Greenwich Village.

Both women cast spells that entrance or enchain the men in their lives: Rose’s aristocratic German Jewish husband, Albert; her nephew, the feckless chess hustler Lenny Angrush; Cicero Lookins, the brilliant son of her black cop lover; Miriam’s (slightly fraudulent) Irish folksinging husband, Tommy Gogan; their bewildered son, Sergius. These flawed, idealistic people all struggle to follow their own utopian dreams in an America where radicalism is viewed with bemusement, hostility, or indifference.

As the decades pass—from the parlor communism of the ’30s, McCarthyism, the civil rights movement, ragged ’70s communes, the romanticization of the Sandinistas, up to the Occupy movement of the moment—we come to understand through Lethem’s vivid storytelling that the personal may be political, but the political, even more so, is personal.

Vericon is a science-fiction, fantasy, gaming, and anime convention featuring many events and distinguished guest speakers. It has been held annually at Harvard University since 2001. The thirteenth Vericon will take place on Friday through Sunday, March 22 to 24.

Harvard Book Store will host author signings with Vericon writers on Saturday March 23, 2013. Stay tuned for updates!

Adrian Tomine signs at Harvard Book Store on Thursday October 4, 2012 at 7:00 PM!

Press Release:

Harvard Book Store welcomes cartoonist and illustrator ADRIAN TOMINE for a discussion of his latest book, New York Drawings.

Two strangers, both reading the same novel, share a fleeting glance between passing subway cars. A bookstore owner locks eyes with a neighbor as she receives an Amazon package. Strangers are united by circumstance as they wait on the subway stairs for a summer storm to pass.

Adrian Tomine’s illustrations and comics have been appearing for more than a decade in the pages (and on the cover) of The New Yorker. Instantly recognizable for their deceptively simple and evocative style, these images have garnered the attention of The New Yorker’s readership and the approbation of such venerable institutions as the Art Directors Club and American Illustration.

New York Drawings is a loving homage to the city that Tomine, a West Coast transplant, has called home for the past seven years. This lavish, beautifully designed volume collects every cover, comic, and illustration that he has produced for The New Yorker to date, along with an assortment of other rare and uncollected illustrations and sketches inspired by the city. Complete with notes and annotations by the author, NewYork Drawings will also feature a new introductory comic focusing on Tomine’s experiences as a New York illustrator.

Harvard Book Store is pleased to welcome graphic novelist and memoirist G. WILLOW WILSON for a reading of her new book, Alif the Unseen.

In an unnamed Middle Eastern security state, a young Arab-Indian hacker shields his clients—dissidents, outlaws, Islamists, and other watched groups—from surveillance and tries to stay out of trouble. He goes by Alif—the first letter of the Arabic alphabet, and a convenient handle to hide behind. The aristocratic woman Alif loves has jilted him for a prince chosen by her parents, and his computer has just been breached by the State’s electronic security force, putting his clients and his own neck on the line. Then it turns out his lover’s new fiancé is the head of State security, and his henchmen come after Alif, driving him underground.

When Alif discovers The Thousand and One Days, the secret book of the jinn, which both he and the Hand suspect may unleash a new level of information technology, the stakes are raised and Alif must struggle for life or death, aided by forces seen and unseen. With shades of Neal Stephenson, Neil Gaiman, Philip Pullman, and The Thousand and One Nights, Alif the Unseen is a tour de force—a sophisticated melting pot of ideas, philosophy, religion, technology and spirituality smuggled inside an irresistible page-turner.